Good

The skin on my hands is dry and tight. I have a mosquito bite the size of a dime on my back shoulder blade (just out of scratch-it-myself reach), and I'm rocking my first copper-pink tint of sunburn. I didn't spend this holiday Monday at the beach, or at a BBQ, or in the burbs. I spent it mucking out my family's house, up to my elbows in mouse poop and dead bugs for half the day, and sorting, boxing, and lugging boxes full of The Stuff of our Family to either the dumpster, the porch, or the back of a pick up truck bound for recycling.

And it was a good day.

I managed to sneak off for a little while to take some photos of some of the flowers and weeds and farmland that will leave an ache in my heart for "home" for the rest of my life. I picked raspberries, smelled cow pastures, and knelt down into the soybean field to examine the skeleton of a cottonwood leaf. Immersed myself in the Beauty in the Breakdown. The lawn had gone to seed, and the neatly manicured garden patches that had been so proud and lovely at our wedding last year had burst exuberantly from the confines of the berm and were wild with unkempt beauty.

Here are some of my fave snaps: